Parchment Letter
by The Lime-Wielding Ninja
Summary: What would have happened if Harry had not brought the Hogwarts letter to the table at breakfast, but had hidden it in the cupboard under the stairs? I don't own. It's all JKRs. Genres may change. Warning! Abuse!
1. Chapter 1

Parchment Letter

Chapter One

"What are you doing, boy? Get the mail and get back here!" Vernon yelled at Harry, who was still looking at the thick letter as though waiting for it to confirm that yes, it was his and he could open it.

Quickly taking the route to the dining room that passed the cupboard under the stairs, Harry shoved his letter through the slot between the door and the wall. He didn't want his uncle finding it and opening it. That letter could contain things that were private, and meant only for him. Whether Uncle Vernon was his relative or not, that letter was Harry's and it was meant for him to read.

Harry rushed into the dining room and placed the other letters on the table, which Uncle Vernon proceeded to peruse.

**:0:**

The rest of the day was much the same as the days previous. Harry was made to clean up after every single thing that Dudley did. Dudley then tried to beat Harry up in the back yard because he said that Harry made him bored, but Harry got away and hid in a lavender bush.

**:0:**

That night, Harry waited until all was quiet, except for the snores of his uncle and cousin.

He rolled over in his cramped little cot to look at the letter beside him, his first letter ever. Savouring the moment, Harry took the letter and turned on his tiny torch he'd stolen from Dudley's room once. Holding the torch in his teeth, Harry read the address on the front, double checking that the letter was indeed his. He felt the strange texture of the parchment in between his fingers. Carefully breaking the seal on the back, Harry removed the letter from its envelope. It read:

_HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY_

_Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore  
(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock, Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)_

_Dear Mr Potter,_

_We are pleased to inform you that you have a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl no later than 31 July._

_Yours sincerely,_

Minerva McGonagall  
Deputy Headmistress

Harry's mind flipped at the first words on the parchment. Witchcraft and Wizardry? Wizards didn't exist, did they? But, according to these people, they did, and they had to be taught somewhere, if they were real.  
But what if this were some sort of mean prank, put on by some of Dudley's smarter friends? That would be a good laugh for them. Then again, none of those boys could write this neatly or formally.

What did that last sentence mean, "_We await your owl no later than 31 July._" Why would he have on owl, and what would he do with it? He supposed that it was some kind of courier system, but instead of pigeons they used owls.  
But how was he going to find an owl that was trained for carrying mail? And what would he write, and how would he be able to get to this school? What if he didn't fit in when he got there? There were so many questions and worries bouncing around in Harry's brain that he kind of snapped. Harry took his things, shoved them in a bag and left number four Privet Drive, not knowing where he was going, and not knowing why.

**A/N: It always annoyed me that Harry never just kept the letter a secret from his aunt and uncle...**


	2. Chapter 2

Parchment Letter

Chapter Two

Harry ran down Privet Drive, the way that he usually went when his uncle and aunt sent him to Mrs. Figg's house down the street. The bag he was carrying had very few things in it: just two days worth of clothes, a book (one that Dudley had been given for his birthday but tossed into the trash, where Harry found it and retrieved it), and the letter from Hogwarts.  
Soon enough, Harry's sanity caught up with him. Unfortunately, he'd been wandering all over Surrey, and now had no idea where Privet Drive was anymore. Looking around, Harry saw more cookie-cutter houses much the same as Number Four had been, though slightly shabbier. He also saw that not far along was a busy street with lots of people, even though it was past eleven, according to the watch on Harry's wrist. Harry sat down on the sidewalk and took another look at the letter. He now felt rather silly for just running off, assuming that the letter had been true. It had kind of explained the many strange incidents he'd gone through the past few years, but who was to say that it was the right explanation. There could be plenty of others...none that came to mind, but there had to be more. This Minerva McGonagall, whoever she was, could just be a made up person.

Why, though, had this letter been brought to Harry? And such a specific address on the front as well; they had known that he'd lived under the stairs.  
Deciding to think this through more in the morning, Harry went out in search of something he could sleep on, like a bench. After many more turns and twists to avoid the busy street, Harry found a school play area in which there was a covered tube on a play structure. That gave him shelter, and probably more warmth than a bench. Before lying down to sleep, Harry put on the two extra layers of clothing (leaving the undergarments in the bag) and lay down in the tube to sleep.  
Just as he was drifting off, a man's face appeared above him with no warning whatsoever. "You are a difficult man to find, Mr Potter."

Harry was, naturally, terrified. He wiggled his way backwards out of the tube and tore out of the playground. In his subconscious he knew that the man could outrun him and catch him, but his instincts had caught him first. To his absolute surprise, the man didn't pursue him until Harry had reached the gate. He then appeared out of nowhere again and blocked Harry's path. Grabbing the startled preteen by the shoulders, the man stopped Harry's next move, and guided him over to the swings.

"Sit, please," he requested.

Harry automatically obeyed.

"Okay, I guess I'd better start," said the man. "I am sorry for startling you, Mr Potter," he said with a nod, making his sandy hair flop over his eyes for a moment. "Now it's your turn," he continued with a polite hand gesture towards Harry. "You can say 'I'm sorry for running away from my home and scaring the wits out of Dumbledore and his friends, Mr Podmore.'"

Harry did. Then "How do you know who I am?"

Mr Podmore laughed. "Who doesn't know who you are, Mr Potter? Quite the celebrity, you are back at home."

'Back at home'. Was this man talking about where his, Harry's, parents had lived?

A thought occurred to Harry. "Do you know what this means, Mr Podmore?" Harry handed the letter to the man.

"Call me Sturgis, Harry," Mr Podmore said, taking the letter in his hands carefully. "May I call you Harry?"

"Sure." Harry saw no reason not to let Sturgis call him by his first name. The man had given out his first name, hadn't he?  
And Harry was a celebrity? That was quite the statement to have dropped on you.

The very second Sturgis opened the letter, he laughed with joy. "What this means, Harry, is that you need to get your school supplies. You can't learn magic with nothing, you know. Oh, look at the time! Come on. The Portkey is about ready to go. Dumbledore is at the other end, he'll explain better than I will. Come on then."

Harry stared at Mr Podmore as though the man's hair had turned to bubbles. Sturgis sighed. "Just hold this fizzy drink can for me, will you?" Sturgis extracted a can of Pepsi from his coat pocket. The second Harry took it, the can glowed bright blue, and there was a tugging sensation from behind his navel. He was jerked forward, unable to let go of the can, felt himself spinning through the air and landed abruptly face down on a maroon carpet.

**A/N: Tadah! I updated really quickly, thanks to the reviews and story alerts. A few people even added this to their favourites, and I thank them.**

**And thanks to the people who made me wonder things about this story, too (Tabbycat1220 and TheGirlCanRock). You helped me a lot.**


	3. Chapter 3

Parchment Letter

Chapter 3

Harry picked himself up off the floor and dusted himself off, looking around him at the same time. He stood in a large room with many portraits of sleeping people on the wall. The truly frightening thing about these pictures is that they were _breathing_! Harry cowered in the middle of the room under one of the tables. He watched one of the portraits that was lower down on the wall drooling into the ear horn depicted there until he heard several sets of footsteps coming into the room. Accompanying those footsteps were voices, one being Sturgis', the other being that of an older man.

"...must have arrived by now."

"He did, Albus, I watched the Portkey take him."

"Well, then, he's bound to be in this room."

And with that, the door opened revealing two sets of robes (supposedly inhabited by people), one simply black and the other blue with red trim around the bottom. Peeking out from under the table, Harry looked up to see above him the underside of Albus Dumbledore's crooked nose, along with a magnificent, pure white beard below it.

"Ah, there he is," Sturgis said when he noticed Harry's head sticking out from under the table. "Harry, this is Professor Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He's also the one who sent out a searching party for you."

"Hello, Mr Potter," said Professor Dumbledore. "Why don't you take a seat?"

Harry saw no reason not to, and the many portraits didn't seem to be attacking him just yet, so he sat down in an overstuffed chair he hadn't noticed before in front of a large oak desk. Dumbledore sat behind said desk and steepled his fingers.

"So, you seem to have been through quite a bit in the last few hours, Mr Potter. Would you care to explain exactly what happened?"

Harry thought about it for a moment, taking care to word things carefully. "I was told by my Uncle Vernon to get the mail, so I did, and then I found that there was a letter for me. That never happens, and it looked really important, so I hid the letter in my, uh, room so that my Uncle didn't read it. If the letter were really important, I would let him read it." Harry thought a bit more. "So when I read the letter, I didn't know if I could believe it, and I had a lot of questions. And then I ran away."

Dumbledore's eyes made contact with Harry's and it seemed to the latter as though he was being x-rayed. Dumbledore nodded his head. "A simple, though useful explanation. Now I believe I owe you a story.

"In your letter, I think it said that you had a place at Hogwarts, yes? You just said that you weren't sure you could believe it, and I think what you meant was that you couldn't believe you were a wizard. Well, Harry, we are currently in my office at Hogwarts, one of the most prestigious schools of magic in the world. And you are indeed a wizard. You are a wizard who has baffled the minds of many other smart wizards and witches of this age, including my own. Do you know how your parents died?"

The question caught Harry slightly off guard. "Th-they died in a car crash...?"

Dumbledore sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose in between his thumb and index finger. "I'm afraid that such a statement would be incorrect, Harry. No, your parents died at the hands of the most feared wizard of all time: Lord Voldemort." Out of the corner of Harry's eye, he saw Sturgis wince and cover his ears as though Dumbledore had said some kind of profanity. "For some reason, the same reason that you baffle the minds of many wizards and witches, Voldemort could not kill you. Somehow, the curse that he'd used on your parents, bounced off you and onto him. Voldemort fled, wanting to rebuild his strength."

Harry nodded his head. "So...I'm a wizard?"

Dumbledore chuckled. "Yes, Harry. You are a wizard."

"How did you know that I ran away."

"Mrs Figg is a dear friend of mine. She thought it was very odd that you would be running down the street at such a fast pace so late at night. She contacted me, and I contacted some of my other friends."

Harry paused so that he could absorb all this information. Then he said "And I've got this letter with all the school supplies on it." Harry handed the letter to the professor. "But I don't know where to get them, and I don't have any money."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that," Dumbledore said in answer, glancing at the letter. "Usually the school has a fund for children who don't have wizard money, but I think in your case your parents left you enough to get your supplies. I'll get someone to go with you tomorrow to the shops that have the things you'll need. Meanwhile, you need to get to bed, and I need to write the Dursleys to let them know where you are and that you're safe." Dumbledore replaced the letter in Harry's hand.

Harry stifled a laugh. "Okay, but, um, where am I going to sleep?" He didn't want to go back to the Dursleys, not after having successfully run away, in his opinion.

"The best thing for you would probably to go straight to the hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey will be there and will make sure you're not ill."

Harry felt his brow knit in confusion. Why would he be ill? "Could you show me there, please? Only, I don't know where it is..."

"Naturally. Follow this." And Dumbledore conjured something silvery that formed into a bird. The bird waited for Harry to follow, flying ahead of him by a bit. Harry decided that, since nothing had been said to the contrary, this Dumbledore could be trusted. And so, it wasn't long until Harry lay asleep in the hospital, dreaming of flying motorcycles.

**A/N: I have gotten such an amazing response from this. I opened my email yesterday, and twenty of the twenty-two emails were either reviews, story/author alert notifications, or favourite story/author notifications. Thanks so much to everyone who read and reviewed or alerted or whatever.**

**Oct. 11th, 2009: I have changed the wording of one of the paragraphs after realising that Harry had not been told where he was.  
**


	4. Chapter 4

Parchment Letter

Chapter 4

Harry opened his bleary eyes the next day to an unfamiliar sensation of warmth and clarity. Fumbling beside the bed for his glasses, he sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. After replacing the glasses on his face, Harry remembered where he was. He was in Hogwarts. He was a wizard. And his parent's had been murdered. A nasty thrill of terror and sadness went through Harry's body at that thought, and he fought back his tears. It was as though it had only just happened. To find out how your parents died wasn't a very nice thing to have dropped on you so suddenly.

"Oh, good, you're awake," a female's voice said brusquely. Harry looked over to see a nurse, maybe in her early seventies, bustling over to where he sat. "Professor Dumbledore told me the situation. You'll need a proper physical examination before I let you leave."

"Um..." Harry faltered. But he couldn't see a way around it.

Madam Pomfrey, the nurse, brought Harry into a white room with various charts on the walls, and an examination table with many drawers and cabinets underneath labelled with strange headings, like '_Skelegrow'_, 'examiscope', and 'defect detector'.

"Just sit yourself up here," Madam Pomfrey said in her no-nonsense voice, patting the examination table with her hand, "and we'll just do a routine check-up."

The examination went fairly well, Harry obliging to the reflex test, eye test and flexibility test without complaint - until the breathing test.

"Okay, now I'm going to have to ask you to take off your jumper Harry," Madam Pomfrey said. "It's too thick to hear your breathing through, even with the stethoscope."

Harry was reluctant. He really didn't want her to see. But Madam Pomfrey was adamant, and Harry couldn't find a good enough argument against such a simple thing. Closing his eyes and bracing himself, he took off his warm, knit sweater. He heard Pomfrey's gasp. "What in the name of Merlin happened to you, dear?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Harry dodged. He opened his eyes and saw the expression of shock on the old nurse's face.

"Take a look in the mirror, Harry."

"Okay."

Standing there, Harry saw himself as he did every day. Half-turning, he looked himself over. There was nothing different, and Harry said so.

"But...the scars, Harry," Madam Pomfrey said.

And they were there, as they had been for so many years. Thick, white lines crisscrossed Harry's shoulder blades and back, making a grotesque kind of pattern. None of them were red as his lightning bolt scar on his head was, but they were there, nonetheless.

"Oh, yeah," Harry said calmly. "Those."

**A/N: I'm sorry I haven't updated in so long, and that this chapter is so short! I just felt like writing this fic today. I wasn't sure I'd write again, but I found a kind of twist I could put in. This is a bit of a weird chapter for me. I'm not in a particularly dark mood, but I threw in the scars anyway. I hope it's not too dark...**

**Oct. 19th: I added a few words and fixed a grammar error.  
**

**By the way, there's a poll on my profile about what I should write next. Take it! Take the poll!  
**


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